I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 1 John 5:13
Simply because you believe everything in the Son of God, you will know by God, what He has in store for us in Heaven.
Father, this is the season we tend to focus on you more. Father, please help us to use these opportunities to turn more people to want and love you more. In Jesus’ name, amen.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39
Nothing anyone, nor anything can be done to make God love us more or less. He loves us just the same as He loves Jesus.
Lord, thank you for the truth! Help us to live by these truths daily to help change the way to world has taught us to think.
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God John 1:12
We are only God’s creation. Enemies from birth. When we accept the gift of salvation by propitiation, we are adopted by God as His very own children.
Father God, I cannot express how wonderful it is to be one of your children! Thank you, thank you! I love you.
Yes it has been weighing on me that I have not posted is a long while. Thoughts of even giving it up came to mind. I think it is the thought of needing to fill in the gap in a huge effort to catch up. That is just not going to happen tho.
I have been trying to get a raise the past couple months. Seems I may have met my challenge in proving my worthiness. Also just that thought of having to prove myself may not be the point and that my boss may have a different idea of what I am worth to him. IMHO, he doesn’t reward based on your efforts but by your loyalty and social status. May be a sad mis-diagnosis of a fellow Christian… I know. However I will not stand down without a stiff answer. Seems as if business has kept us from meeting since my initial inquiry. That and the lack of courage and preparedness. So I suck! 
I’m hoping that we will once and forever lose Made2Manage. The latest stunt is a stiff price for doing our customization. Somewhere about $67k and the kicker is the no liability warranty sticker to go with it! For just a bit more… $87k we can go with a much better IMO, ERP package called Abas. This includes our training, customization, setup, installation, and product. This is a German company and has thoroughly impressed me. Problem is I found this company without much effort. This may be bad based on the lack of research into other companies. My search was narrowed by Linux requirements tho. The next bet was an OpenSource project, but I just didn’t want to back it. If I had a team of supporters here in the office it would be different.
Serving at the church has been picking up too! I am now a “Small Group Connector” who finds a group for individuals looking for Community Groups or Men’s Breakfast/Mentoring groups and such. I also have been helping out with a ToolBox project with the church website. Won’t be helping too much with this as they insist on using Microsoft products. So they are mostly interested in my direction I guess. The other thing is I have been meeting with two mentors quite regularly. Doing some workgroup type studies including some memory verse practice. I also have been helping out with Wednesday evening 4th grader classes. Tonight I have them by myself as the main teacher is out of town. I’m hopping next year I will have my own class. I like the 4th grade too. Not interested in moving up with my class. Still seeking an answer from the Lord on what to do about helping out with Summer Camp next month. It is looking more and more in favor tho!
I have been working on my old hard drive once again. I had been playing with some new partitioning tools from various CDs and ended up using the old standby fdisk for Linux. The trouble had been creating the same partitioning scheme I had written down at the time it was working. I have since figured out how to do this but also figured out a more damaging concept that may be the last straw… c/h/s. Cylinder/Heads/Sectors geometry. Seems I even documented this in the working stage before I doused it. What I wrote down was not the manufacture geometry shown on this drive. So I assume the geometry was changed about three times in the midst of all this. Testing on the documented and recommended geometries didn’t work. What doesn’t work is that I can’t mount the drive. It won’t recognize the system file type. This has not been formatted since either so there may be some extra levels I just don’t comprehend about it needing it. IMO that would be the last straw… in a sense wiping the drive.
This week I have tightened the noose on the spammers. I have been building a blacklisted.rules file that is now up to about 200 IPs and networks that have been blacklisted. With the rampant viruses and spyware out, this is a difficult task. Mutation through the networks seems to be never ending.
Okay so today’s troubles weren’t exactly Microsoft related. I was scheduled along with another coworker to attend an online Made2Manage virtual class. I was first to log in and called in soon after for the voice side of the class. Probably about 10 minutes into the class I loose sound in the phone. So I informed the instructor that I was heading up to the coworkers office to attend from there. Then I found she too was not getting sound. All of the office was down! We could call each other inside the office and receive DID calls from the outside, but no incoming to the main number nor could we pick up an outside line to make calls. So I borrowed a cell phone from someone and call our Executone office and they were going to call back on the cell. Needless to say… this techie could not figure out how the dang thing worked to answer it! I kept bringing up the address book. Then when I got it figured out, it wasn’t the call I was waiting for! Oh well, they showed up and fixed it after some time by just resetting the cards. Learning more and more each time he comes out to fix us up. I was telling him if he kept that up they would become obsolete.
Me and the family went to our home town this weekend. Didn’t want to since we had planned to for Easter too. I figured we’d better now before it got any closer. It was supposed to be a non event visit. Turns out they made it a combined birthday party on Sunday for my daughter and nephew who’s birthdays was on the 22nd. We were only there for about 24 hours. Sometimes those short trips are the best but they also kill the weekend. I’d say most of my weekends feel like three days but this kind of trip made it feel like one day. I had a great talk with my grandmother. She is a devout Catholic/Presbyterian. Attends church both Saturday and Sunday to both churches. She also tithes to both! I gave her the “Purpose Driven Life” book for Christmas. I almost thought it was the most meaningful gift I ever gave her. She expressed a satisfying thankfulness for the gift. This trip I see she has read 7 chapters. Doesn’t have a lot of time to read it she says. Not sure if that is the case but rather a hard to swallow conviction maybe. Her beliefs go deeper into tradition than I could expect her to give up. She thinks the death of so many churches is because of the parents. She thinks having a personal relationship with God means feeling his presence as a physical touch. She prays in memorized prayer. She has a problem with the woman’s position God has given them in the world. This was an awesome opportunity to tell her about what my relationship was like. I told her that the death of so many churches are due to their inability to change tradition to accept younger people. Our church is well aware of this and employs ongoing changes to the music worship ever year. Not to mention many other youth inviting places to server. Having a relationship with God could include feeling his touch, but there is a more indescribable feeling when you are close to Him. Having a continual chit-chat with Him throughout the day. Not getting stuck in repetitive meaningless chants. The Lutheran church we attend there sounds so robotic! Every prayer is written in the handouts and there seems to be no prayer from the heart. Everyone prays with their eyes open reading the words instead of listening. Not going to mention the off key tone deaf singing. But then again God does love all forms of worship! My point here is finding the reason why churches are dying today. If God has answered me, he has mentioned that nothing will save these dying churches. Only new born-again churches will rise. Some will occupy the same buildings, but most will not be of the same denomination. Religion is spelled as “D-O”, what I can do to get what I want. Christianity is spelled “D-O-N-E”, what has been done already. Jesus has already made the biggest sacrifice for our eternity and we can’t repay him. To attempt to repay him is an insult. Like paying someone back for giving you a birthday present! I would be insulted for getting the gift back. So I pray that my grandma would think about what I had said and that God would open her mind to a new rebirth.
I think I’m going to just give up on the virus updates. There are just too many to keep up on to mention here. I recommend updating your data files every hour! 
Last Friday I determined this SCSI tape drive we have here has a bad motor for driving the tape reals. Talked with Certance, who handles Seagate tape hardware now. The tech said I needed to call their warranty dept for a swap and pay ~$165 for a refurbished unit that has a warranty of 90 days. The gal I spoke with wants $250! So I flat out said she must be pulling my leg because I could get one elsewhere for less without sending them my broken one. Without the core they would charge another $500 something! So I have now found a few sites selling refurbished units for less like I said without having checked, plus some do 90 days and others do 1 year!
Was unable to post Thursday. Bresnan had upgraded some hardware causing major outages and thus changing my IP again. I had a bigger skuff about this with our business account and the fact that we pay for a static IP. I wanted a discount because of this as well. Point being that they missed our account for calling before the outage. I want to make sure they understand that we are serious about keeping the same IP we pay extra for. On the flip side I got a new bill from USA Digital. They charged us $150 for not returning the cable modem the corporate office already conceded that we own and said they would let the local office know. In my talking with the corporate office again, they got that straightened… I wasn’t going to bring it up but now that this communication problem keeps rolling around with them, I had to mention that we have not been getting our $5 discount for the past 2 years then. So she was going to check into that and get back with me. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to keep dragging your feet. I was going to just let it go, but since they just want to milk us I couldn’t resist.
Yes the possessed IBM PC is back. I’m working on it’s replacement as I type. It continues to freeze up on boot up. Never fails that after fixing this some other problem occurs. This time it was a network issue. The MAC address security between the two access points seemed to be missing this IBM’s MAC address. Which was fine by me I guess because it wasn’t supposed to work in the first place! I first thought that this NIC had some how changed it’s address. I have seen this happen before but only by one character… this was the complete address. Anyway adding the MAC to the second AP did the trick. I need to check for updates on their firmware I guess. That goes for my other wireless network as well. I had trouble with enabling the encryption on that. It still runs open!
On the M2M front… my coworker and I have been waiting for the right time to ask the boss about the upcoming conference in Las Vegas this June. Interestingly enough today the boss forwarded the email about the conference to both of us. I think this might be some type of praise! Yesterday ADS called the boss trying to win us back I suppose. Not sure what he said, but the boss transferred him to me. The impression I got was that he and my boss have “made arrangements” to talk with each other at a later date. So I’m not too sure why he needed to talk with me. I didn’t offer any information as to our dropping them. Seems they only pay attention to us when there’s money to be had anyway. I sure hope that dance is over!
It seems one of our Mormon coworkers is now leaving this week. I am happy for them but sad they (he and his family) are leaving. I had taped some informative Mormon beliefs videos for him some time ago. They are rather new to their faith and passionate about God. I have concluded they have no idea what they are getting into and had to step forward. They didn’t have much to loose if they were to step away from them. No family ties or works involvement yet. So when he broke the news to me yesterday, I pleaded with him to watch the videos. I had lent him my flight stick and a couple old PC games. I told him he could have them under the condition they would watch the videos. That reminds me… I was thinking in bed last night that I should pick up the book “Purpose Driven Life” for them before the week is over. Another condition for them to read it after watching the videos. You never know who God may put in your path, but I’m getting the hint that you’ve got to work fast these days before the opportunity passes. We had two Jehovah Witness gals come to work here and I don’t think I said enough if not at all about His Word. I did a little with one, but her interests didn’t bring out any questions. She was the stronger of the two if that means anything.
Went out for dinner with the family and some friends. They bought dinner. Didn’t want them to. They have financial struggles as we do. Was nice of them to do so. Got lots of cards and the wife and kids got me a nice T-shirt. My folks send my money and my mom’s old coat she didn’t like any more. I needed one. It smells nice like my mom! It’ll take a while to get used to the color. I don’t think I own anything yellow. Waited up watching TV just in case the folks called. I guess I slipped by them for a change. Then again I hope it wasn’t pay back time. It seems that I have forgotten a time or two birthdays. I really need to get an automated reminder scheduler going. I think my uncle got his going because two of his sons emailed me. Today my cousin Brad from the Navy wished me a happy birthday. That was nice. Wish I could have gotten to know him better as a kid. He was born about 10 years late for the group. Of course they moved often and made it hard to keep up. He’s a good kid. I wish him the best out there on the boat.
Well it seems I can’t get the dang firmware upgraded on the AP’s. The screen spins into infinity and refreshing the front screen shows the old version still. Been working on Symantecs AMS service. I had taken a stab at this some time ago to no avail. Seems it may be once again. Did make some progress however. So now to deliver the PC to Building B tomorrow.
